Ottawa will turn over police records to residential school survivors

OTTAWA – The federal government has agreed to turn over thousands of police documents that survivors of a notorious aboriginal residential school say are crucial to their compensation claims.

A spokeswoman for Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt says the government will comply with a ruling by an Ontario Superior Court judge that ordered it to hand over the documents in its possession.

Survivors of the St. Anne’s school in northern Ontario had taken the federal government to court over access to thousands of pages of evidence from a provincial police investigation in the 1990s.

The police investigation found evidence of horrific abuse — including the use of an electric chair — against the aboriginal students.

The federal government had argued it lacked the authority to turn over the police documents.

But Justice Paul Perell of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruled that the federal government took an unduly narrow interpretation of its obligations and must hand over the police documents.